SOURCE: “The Vital Vidal,” in Times Literary Supplement, November 5, 1993, p. 28.

In the following review of United States, MacIntyre offers a largely positive assessment of Vidal's essays, though he argues that Vidal is a “snob” whose writings sometimes suffer from his “aloofness.”

Say what you like about Gore Vidal (and no living American writer has generated more conversation), he has not been idle in the past forty years. Were he a character in one of his novels, he might be dismissed as exaggerated and improbable, for he has been, in ascending order of accomplishment, a politician, an actor, a playwright, a script-writer, a novelist and finally, and most brilliantly, an essayist—a form in which he combines elements of all the above, writing prose that is political, histrionic, dramatic, filmic and fictive.

Both of his bids for political office, in 1960 and in 1982, proved ineffective; as an actor (most recently...